Women in PE, class of 2023: Veena Isaac

Veena Isaac learned over a 20-year career in finance that not every day will be perfect. The key is to not let it get you down.

That goes for life outside of work too. Isaac is mother to three boys: 10-year-old twins and a three-year-old. “Having our families help and sharing responsibilities has been really critical for us,” she says. “I won’t be able to go to every event, and that’s ok, when I am home, I try to just be more focused on the time I have with the kids.”

That sense of balance has taken Isaac through her career that now has her and two colleagues co-leading Apollo’s foray into GP and LP secondaries and hybrid services, which the firm is calling S3. Formed last year, S3 launched with $4 billion in capital, including a multi-billion-dollar commitment from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign fund.

“I kind of fell into it. I liked the velocity of deal flow, the diversity of deal types, the emphasis on purchase price and finding situations with structural alpha”

Her career started at Goldman Sachs, later joining a team in investment management doing secondaries. This was in 2003, at an early moment in the evolution of secondaries.

“I kind of fell into it,” she says. “I liked the velocity of deal flow, the diversity of deal types, the emphasis on purchase price and finding situations with structural alpha.” From there she went to business school at Stanford. Isaac was born in India and spent much of her childhood in Saudi Arabia before attending boarding school in the US.

Isaac then joined Pantheon in New York, helping to build out the London firm’s presence on the East Coast. It was at Pantheon that Isaac realized she thrived in an entrepreneurial environment where “the business-building component and the investing component go hand in hand,” she says.

After a couple years at Jasper Ridge Partners, she joined BlackRock and helped raise a $3 billion secondaries fund in 2021. She joined Apollo last year.

She says the secondaries industry has evolved in a specific way for LPs and GPs: “There’s been a shift in the mentality of secondaries really going from a distressed option with episodic selling to something more systematic and tied to regular-way portfolio construction and fund management.”

Isaac has been one of the few women in the room during her career, and secondaries has only gradually opened up to more diversity. She’s glad to see more women enter the industry as more opportunities open for them, through mentorship programs and networking organizations and events. “It’s really positive,” she says.